No Ulysses, you.
I no Telemachus wave-leaping bold.
You left when I was six years-old
No embrace or adeiu.
Did my rosy fingertips frighten you,
My accidental dawn on your horizon?
What was I then smiling prize or crying poison
Killing your youth too soon?
No, no, no Ulysses, you,
In our little block house alone,
Little Penelope with a suitor gone
Left two boys, one five, one two.
No black-beaked ship but a bread truck
Rattling through the foggy gray.
I remember those OJ and doughnut days
By your side, happy-did you feel stuck?
No father, I don't envy you
The Sirens wringing your mind,
Not lashed to the mast, left us behind
To bobble untethered in the blue.
Damn you! Leaving your sons marooned.
Two twisted and wailing crones
Barely keeping us skin and bones.
As thin as thread from fate's cruel loom.
No, no Ulysses you,
When no Kalypso held you back,
After years of losing track
Appearing in your cracker-jack suit of blue.
You myth! Becoming flesh in our broken story.
When just a child I was thrown to chance,
And with her whirling in a fickle dance
In neither heaven nor hell, but purgatory.
Your suit of blue, your mirrored shoes,
Tall as a post on our front porch,
Grin beaming like a torch-
A foreigner, a ruse.
Too late for the Telemachus you abandoned
Who learned that life is shifting sand,
Unrhymed lines without plan,
No, no godlike Telemachus, but broken Brandon.
Quite puerile, but maybe you all have some input?
Sorry, you cannot respond to an archived poemReviews
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"Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."
The perfect mimicry of Plath's piece achieves an eerie effect-- not necessarily a bad thing, just unsettling. I read your piece, and I hear Plath's piece in my head, the mirrored rhythms form a chorus. The fact that you are writing this as a man/boy's perspective really challenges the notion that only women have daddy issues-- men may have them, but aren't supposed to talk about them.
A notable difference that saves this from being a mere imitation piece is the use of the use of Ulysses, where Plath used Holocaust, WWII Germany and gypsy imagery.
I really like the lines,
"No black-beaked ship but a bread truck
Rattling through the foggy gray.
I remember those OJ and doughnut days"
You have a real gift, as I saw in some of your earliest postings, for evoking a whole season or era in a few words.
Also,
"No father, I don't envy you
The Sirens wringing your mind,
Not lashed to the mast, left us behind
To bobble untethered in the blue"
is a succinct, haunting expression of madness.
"thin as thread from fate's cruel loom"-- another allusion to pepper up the Classical stew.
You say that this poem is puerile-- but our relationships, particularly our troubled relationships, with our fathers render us childlike. I think Plath wrote "Daddy" from the perspective of a hurt little girl, and this poem is clearly the voice of a hurt little boy.
The way you handle it is different than Plath, or any other woman, would handle it-- you are "no godlike Telemachus, but broken," where she goes on to become Lady Lazarus.
Ah, what more can I say? I like the piece-- I am categorically incapable of disliking such a well-considered echo of Sylvia, even if it is meant to be parody. More importantly, it is what has become (in my mind anyway), quintessentially Brandon-- disguising demons in precise lines, at once self-mocking and mocking the world.
Lauren
P.S. I think it takes real balls to include your own name in a piece. I don't know if I like it or not, but there's no question-- cajones, man.
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Definitely not a parody...
but an homage, while at the same time an exorcism. I've never sent this to my father. He doesn't know about it. I've never sent any of my poems to him. I haven't even sent one of my poems to a publisher. I'm that afraid... -
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You shouldn't be. Writing it is the hard part, I think-- facing the devil with nothing but a crossed stick and some holy water, or, in our case, a piece of paper and and some ink, is the major battle. The publishers are small potatoes. What's the worst they can do? They'll send you a form letter. (You've really never submitted??? I must warn you: the size of the rejection letter shrinks in relation to the self-importance of the publication. The New Yorker sends its rejections out on tiny cards, smaller, I think, than a business card.)
I really think talent should be shared with the world.
As to your father. . . I'm in no position to judge there. The only family members I share my poetry with is my husband and, every now and then, my brother. But then, that's mainly because the rest of my family has no appreciation for poetry of any kind. The piece that got accepted recently-- they'll buy the magazine when it comes out, but only so they can set it on the coffee table and tell visitors that their daughter is a published author. Whaddaya gonna do?
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made me so sad.
What a bastard, what a myth, to live with, to grow up with.
Exorcism sounds like an apt word for adressing such a deep wound to the spirit of a child.
Yet writers can and do wreak vengeance on the undead cruel past and its devils. Best RA
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Thanks
for reading this. It's not really a poem that I think is one of the better one's I've written. It is what it is I guess. Maybe I can do something else with it at some point. Anyway, thanks.
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celestialpie
January 3, 2008